


girls never know (how they make a boy feel)

by bittybelle



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Teen Titans (Animated Series), Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: 5 Things, Awkward Flirting, Dorky Teens, F/M, First Kisses, Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 13:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6660694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittybelle/pseuds/bittybelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She kissed him, suddenly—a kiss full of mischief and sunset light and pizza grease, and his lips parted on instinct, like the kiss at the end of the type of movie he never watched. </i><br/> <br/>Or: five times Robin kissed, or was kissed by, a girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	girls never know (how they make a boy feel)

**Author's Note:**

> Consider this my attempt to marry "Dick Grayson (a la comic canon) is a womanizer" to "Robin (a la TT animated canon) is an emotionally compromised baby Batman." Title lifted from Franz Ferdinand's "No You Girls."

**o1. Raven**

They were fifteenish, probably she was fifteenish, sometimes Robin wondered because, well, did years work the same way on Azarath? And the team was new, they were all new to each other, no edges worn to smoothness. Each of them an angle digging into the raw flesh of another. Raven was new to _everything_ , coltish and wary, her eyes flickering like cheap Christmas lights at every shaking shadow.

And he was—he wasn’t answering any of Bruce’s calls. Or Alfred’s. Or Barbara’s. He was chalking a bold line between past and present, he was taking half of it and putting it in deep freeze, he was eclipsing Sidekick with Leader as fully as he possibly could, but that corona, the _Batman and_ of it all, refused to dim.

It wasn’t his town, as the smugglers sneered when he lashed them to light poles. He hadn’t made it his town. He hadn’t made them his team. They struggled through the mandatory Friday dinners he’d established, because, well, how else were they going to make this work? Beast Boy was callow and creaky-voiced. Cyborg flinched away from anything friendlier than a wave. Starfire was suspicious of every offered slice of pizza. And Raven—

And Raven was Raven, but she was trying. She was really, earnestly trying to a degree he’d only fully comprehend years from then, her plum-colored eyes large and—well, not guileless, but _trying_. A column of dusk in the training room, a shy little ghost on the couch, a girl—a smoke-colored, cloak-draped girl, but a girl nonetheless—on the roof, at dawn, visibly frightened by his entrance.

“It’s—it’s a good place to meditate,” she murmured, casting her gaze downward, onto the breaking waves below. “My room doesn’t have the right, um, resonance. Yet.”

That’s fine. That’s—totally fine.” He cleared his throat. “I’m just kind of an early riser.”

She moved towards him, past him, eager to leave, but he placed a hopefully-calming, hopefully-not-weird hand on her shoulder and mustered something that approximated an authoritative smile.

“C’mon,” he said. “I feel like I don’t really know anything about you yet.”

He didn’t learn much, but they went back the next day and let the dawn wash away, if only for an hour, some of the edges and angles. She stopped pulling her hood up so instinctively, and it was—well, it was nice. She looked like a girl in a woodcut, a figure in an illuminated manuscript—something drawn with a heavy hand, with little interest in subtlety. Enormous, swallowing eyes, high cheekbones, something of the startled deer in her face, but something behind that, too—something he could only see at dawn, when she muttered on about another place she refused to bring into focus, a place she’d grown up with “mother,” “teachers,” and “not many” friends.

She did not ask about Batman. He did not ask about that mother, or those teachers, or that absence of friends. Mostly, they talked about Jump and how they were settling in and sometimes the weather, but in a nice way. The ideal of small talk, the luxury of frivolous words when there were still so many forms to sign, so much construction to be done, so many texts to ignore and delete and pretend had never arrived.

The kiss, when it happened, was full of regret before it was even halfway over. She pulled away, radiant with embarrassment, and she was—well, she was so pretty and they were both so scared—

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, the rasp fallen from her voice. “I don’t know why I did that.”

A gull wheeled overhead, its shadow a lunatic scribble over them, between them, tension made animate. “It’s fine,” he said, exhaling. “We’re all kind of…on edge.”

“Yeah.” She swallowed. She pulled up her hood. She glanced towards him. _I was thinking about it too_ , he did not say. He was thinking about her, and about Starfire, and about Babs, and about none of them, about nothing but the basement stairwell and the banister it needed.

 

**o2. Terra**

She pressed the kiss on him suddenly, almost angrily, one night after hand-to-hand training. Alone in the basement hallway, everyone else upstairs, the light a thin, jaundiced wash of not-quite-yellow. He’d been rounding a corner and then—then suddenly she was there, all elbows and knees, that risibly glamorous fall of blonde bisecting her grubby face. Her hands—too big for the rest of her, especially in those worn work gloves—clutching at his shoulders, the kiss a hot, hard thing, like a smack.

He staggered backwards. Her eyes were the blue of a bonfire’s heart, nearly wrathful in her frustration and embarrassment and who knew what else because—what the hell was she doing, what was she _thinking_ —

“Terra,” he stammered, marshaling every scrap of authority he had, shaping it desperately into something like a tone of leaderly concern. “What’s—“

“Never mind,” she said, whirling, nearly running upstairs, nothing like tears in her voice yet still something that threatened to break.

Months later, as she poised the boulder above him for the killing blow, he heard it again.

**o3. Bumblebee**

She slammed him up against the wall— _she_ slammed _him_ —and she kissed him like she did everything else: with every atom of her being straining towards suddenly singular purpose.

It was the second time. The first time had been during their yearly sabbatical—one long weekend in the just-in-case loft apartment they kept in Cincinnati, drunk on paperwork and League missives and all the other shit that went into the Big Report, as Bee had taken to calling it. Cataloguing how many training dummies they’d beaten past any hope of repair, how much money they had intercepted in the process of being laundered, how many petty thieves turned out to be purposeful distractions and how many turned out to just be petty thieves. They slept in three-hour chunks, waking irritably, forgetting to turn on lights and then forgetting to turn them off, pausing to adjust uniforms that weren’t there because going incognito _is just what makes sense, okay,_ Bee had said, rolling her lovely eyes.

So he was maskless—in jeans and a t-shirt as well, but mostly he was maskless and his hair had gotten longer than he’d realized. Bee spent most of her time in a camisole pajama set, the little shorts printed with manatees. She was deadly serious in her manatee pajamas, a portrait of focus, stabbing at the calculator beside her with one polished nail.

She’d smiled—a small, quick, earnest thing—after he emerged from the bathroom, itchy in his new clothes, the thinner skin around his eyes smarting from the way the spirit gum had pulled.

“You look nice,” she’d said. “Younger without it. But also…weirdly older?”

“Yeah?”

“I dunno.” She shrugged one shoulder—a schoolgirl’s gesture, and suddenly he could see her: valedictorian, captain of the debate team, trying to get a girl’s boxing club started. The tips of her wings twitched, catching the light from the sliding glass door to the balcony, sudden slanting pools of iridescence. “It’s nice. But weird, because I’m so used to seeing your face under headlines like, GRAYSON SEEN WITH STARTLET VON MONEYBUX AT SOMETHING-OR-OTHER BENEFIT.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s…it’s weird.”

She blinked. He blinked. He realized she could see him blinking. He coughed.

She smiled. “Do you ever get to drive the Batmobile?”

And the thing was, he didn’t mind her asking about Gotham. He didn’t mind her asking about anything. She had a laugh she was free with, like a sudden gush of water from a craggy cliff side, and it was never mocking or skeptical or anything but delighted to be happening. So he told her, yeah, he did sometimes, and hey, how did she get those wings? And they ate pizza, standing hip-to-hip on the square little slab of a balcony, watching the city lights blot out the stars—like teenagers, like kids, like the good kids with the good grades and the bright futures everyone was in a hurry to ensure with scholarship money.

Which was who he was, he told her. He was technically away at Swiss boarding school. She laughed, a pepperoni plummeting to who-knew-where below.

“What kind of stuff is Dick Grayson getting up to at Swiss boarding school?” She cocked her head to the side, smiling. “I feel like he’s the terror of all the lederhosen-clad maidens of the nearby village.”

“Lederhosen is German. And for guys.” But he was smiling. “I think Dick is really focused on his studies right now. But only because the cheese-maker’s daughter dumped him.”

“I bet he’s really good at beer pong.”

“No way. They only play Veuve Clicquot pong at Swiss boarding school.”

“With 24 karat ping pong balls.”

“Encrusted with diamonds.”

“Hidden in some shell-game bank account.”

“Along with the 4000-thread count togas.”

She kissed him, suddenly, a kiss full of mischief and sunset light and pizza grease, and his lips parted on instinct, opening, a kiss at the end of the type of movie he never watched. They broke apart and nothing in her face said regret, nothing said _I’m sorry_ or _I don’t know what I was thinking_ : she knew what she was thinking and she knew what he was thinking which was, _god, I really, really like her._

And they were so ahead of schedule, so on top of everything, and the light in this scuffed little apartment, with its two-burner not-even-a-stove and its landlord thinking they were taking a gap year before college, was so unlike the light in the Tower, or the Manor, or even under the big top. So they fell onto the couch and they did some more kissing and they fell asleep and they wrapped up forms A6 through B12 and they kissed a little more and she pulled off his shirt and it was just—

It was just the one time, just those three days in a strange place wearing strange clothes, and at the end of it they took their separate trains heading to separate cities. The next email he got from her was entitled _FWD: Steel City Officer Facing Indictment._

And it might have only ever been that time, that brief and lovely and impossible scrap of a weekend if they hadn’t had to do the damn thing every year.

So three hours in she was pressing him into the wall, hungry and wanting, his eyes fluttering shut, kissing her deeply, hands raking her back, slipping beneath the hem of her shirt, seeking out that sunset light from wherever it was hiding.

They lay sprawled across the carpet afterwards, hair mussed, her hands tracing nonsense across his stomach, knowing it would be the last time.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said, her hand slowing to a stop. “I just don’t want to deal with it.”

“Who would I tell?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you let Raven in on all your dirty secrets.”

“No.” He took the stilled hand, squeezed, released. “It’s fine.”

The lease went up in September. He found a two-bedroom place in Denver instead.

 

**o4. Barbara**

He went home for Christmas, thinking, well, it was time. Swallowing the urge to ponder whether or not it was really “home” for Christmas any longer.

But also, of course, this meant he was home from Swiss boarding school, and so there he was in his old bedroom, the mahogany and the for-real oil paintings and the closet full of six hundred dollar shoes, and there was Barbara, louche in the midst of it, leafing through a tattered copy of _The Phantom Tollbooth_.

“I think,” he said, trying very hard not to contemplate how she looked in his bed, in the bed he’d lay in thinking about her, “that that was the first book Alfred ever gave me.”

She smiled that little librarian’s smile of hers, cocking her head to the side, not losing her place because, well, of course she didn’t. “No, that was _The Wind in the Willows_.”

“Oh. Right.”

She got up and she was gorgeous. She’d been gorgeous, of course, she hadn’t ever stopped, but something about her had deepened, sharpened—the youthful possibility of her beauty grown suddenly articulate. She wore a stained Gotham Knights hoodie and she slid from the bed and she was wearing those sweat pants with the squirrel print he remembered too well and she smelled like Alfred’s pancakes.

“You need to get ready for the party.”

“I know.” He swallowed. “Are you coming?”

“You’re my date, silly.”

It took hours because none of his old suits fit and Alfred nearly cried over _the swiftness of time’s river, my boy_ and Bruce made some kind of millionaire miracle happen so that his ward could be seen in nothing less than Armani. He looked at himself in the mirror and suddenly Babs was in the mirror too, elegant in green, her hair—a red so familiar to him yet so unlike what he’d since grown used to—studded, somehow, with pearls.

“It’s a real party,” she said, grinning openly. The last time he’d seen that grin, she’d been zip-tying the Riddler’s hands together and he’d been thinking, _my god, I am screwed_. “My dad is here.”

He did the Dick Grayson thing, but the Dick Grayson thing had shifted from Promising Wunderkind to Dashing Young Man and he didn’t know what to do with his hands. Barbara laughed at everything in all the right ways and she dazzled the dean of Gotham University with her thoughts on Ruby programming and he thought, _my god, not again_.

She drank a little too much champagne, as she was wont to do. And, well, he couldn’t handle another round of _I don’t manage to do much skiing between semesters, unfortunately,_ so they went wandering through the lesser rooms, the Look At Me, Playboy Bon Vivant rooms, and collapsed into a heap in a cracking leather armchair. She lay in his lap, somehow sprawled and compact simultaneously. He looked at her, the soft swells of her body swathed in serpent-colored silk, all warm and female and perilously close at hand. Her lipstick was smeared and she was explaining, in a slippery voice, that she didn’t even need to do her Biophysics homework anymore, there was no way she wasn’t going to ace that class, and he was a little boy again, a backflipping boy wonder in the presence of a daredevil nymph, giggling over the periodic table.

She lay her head against the armrest. “I bet you’re doing so much good shit in Jump.”

“I—“ He cleared his throat. “We try.”

“You,” she murmured. “I mean _you_. You’re so damn smart, Dick. And responsible, I mean, my god.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Pssh.” She rolled her eyes. Babs, Babs, beautiful, confident Babs, old enough to be impossible, young enough to tantalize, _I wonder if she’d ever—could she ever—Babs, do you ever—_

The kiss was a brief thing, a snatched thing, snapped off at the end, suddenly, with a sharp giggle.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m drunk.”

And she was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, but suddenly—she was also Babs in Burnside, Babs who was 21 and majoring in computer science and still had the little crescent of a scar dimpling her chin from that one time with Crazy Quilt. Babs who was experimenting with slacking off a little and maybe that was okay. Maybe it was going to be okay.

He smiled, and it was easy, and he kissed her back but it was a light thing, almost friendly, and she rolled out of his lap and onto the floor.

Grinning, grinning hard like the brilliant student and daring crimefighter and gorgeous goddamn girl she was, she looked up at him. “Want to go steal a bunch of canapés?”

They were delicious.

**o5. Starfire**

She caught him heavily in her arms, nothing of the smooth certain sweep they usually had, a shakily-footed snatch of a rescue from the unforgiving landscape of what used to be Sudsy Sal’s Laundromat. His momentum sent them rolling behind a bank of dryers, rubble insinuating itself between them—but there, there came the linoleum-shaking collapse of Robin’s somnolex dart overtaking Mammoth’s prefrontal cortex. The flush of victory, the smell of her hair, Jinx’s shriek of frustration _damn it, forgot about Jinx_ , but before they sprang apart—

Just once, just one obliterating kiss, as swallowingly deep and dark as the space between the stars, the longing of five years crowded into two seconds, two thoughtless seconds—they broke apart and she didn’t even look upset or embarrassed or surprised, it had been the most sensible thing they’d ever done together, and years later, after that fight, after Tokyo, after too many kisses to recall, he’d remember—

“Go,” she whispered, scarlet strands sticking to her lower lip, wet with sweat and spit and blood.

He took her hand, and did.


End file.
